Guest blogger Roxanne Miller is a 2nd-year MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, focusing her studies on the intersection of international development, social enterprise and technology.  She spent this past summer interning at Unitus and working on an ICTD health care project in Uganda.  Prior to Haas, Roxanne was a Kiva Fellow in Tanzania and spent several years in marketing roles at Yahoo! and American Express.  She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Communications.

By Roxanne Miller

I was very excited to listen to the speakers as I walked into the "Beyond Microfinance" panel at the Social Capital Markets Conference. I had read about the Clinton Global Initiative commitments that both Root Capital and Leapfrog Investments made last month; it was also an opportunity to hear about the work I had seen unfold while working for Unitus this past summer.

The panelists, led by moderator Betsy Zeidman of the Milken Institute, discussed new services and financial structures being designed to help the people at the base of the pyramid. Jim Roth of Leapfrog Investments spoke about the emerging area of microinsurance,  Derek Streat of Unitus discussed how insights from the microfinance industry could be leveraged to other sectors and William Foote of Root Capital talked about the innovative ways he is working to bring capital to small and growing businesses.

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Guest blogger Charlene Chen is a 2nd-year MBA at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, with a focus on international development through ICT and social entrepreneurship. She spent this past summer working in SME development at an internet services provider in Ghana. Prior to Haas, she worked at Deloitte Consulting and earned a B.S. in Computer Science and Psychology from Duke University.

By Charlene Chen

These may seem like depressing times, judging by the current economic crisis. Yet there were nothing but smiles at the Social Capital Markets conference, brought together dozens of organizations and hundreds of individuals reaffirming their commitment to investing in or sustaining social enterprises. I was particularly inspired by the variety of creative approaches to address capital market failures in developing countries.

On Tuesday afternoon, I attended the panel session entitled "Innovative Ways to Invest from Brazil to Kenya", moderated by John Duffy of Goodwell Investments, a social entrepreneur with experience ranging from the Peace Corps to Wall Street. The three panelists discussed different challenges in bringing innovative investment vehicles for social ventures in emerging markets.

The "Missing Middle": Small and medium-sized enterprises in west Africa

Linda Jenkinson is Managing Director and Founder of WOW Investments, which is a nonprofit social investment fund focused on women-based SME development in West Africa.

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Aden Van Noppen is a senior at Brown University where she studies International Development. She is also an intern for Acumen Fund, where she works to develop programs that teach college students about private sector solutions to poverty. Aden was formerly an intern for Dalberg Global Development Advisors where she worked on the development of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs.

By Aden Van Noppen

These four panelists are without a doubt putting a new spin on development. All four use investment as their social impact tool of choice, but what made the panel so compelling is understand how and why they have all chosen to do it a little differently.

Charly Kleissner, co-founder of KL Felicitas Foundation, moderated the panel of Vineet Rai from Aavishkar, Jill Chen from the Grameen Foundation, Arun Gore from Gray Matters Capital (GMC), and Noah Beckwith from Aureos.

Together, the panelists demonstrated a myriad of methods that fall under umbrella of social investing. They showed that the objective of the investment determines the appropriate size and nature of the investment vehicle. Aureos, for example, gives loans of between $2 and $10 million to bring small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to scale. They created their first fund in 1989, making them one of the oldest investors represented at the conference.  Aureos’ premise is that providing capital to the “missing middle” of the developing world (i.e., the SME sector) will create more jobs and have a more sustainable effect on the macro economy than traditional approaches.

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Guest blogger Champa Gujjanudu is an 1st-year MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley with an emphasis in social impact consulting and community development. Prior to Haas, Champa was a Strategy Consultant with BearingPoint in the Bay Area and in New Zealand. She has held consulting positions in various industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology. She graduated with a degree from the University of Auckland with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics and Business Information Systems.

By Champa Gujjanudu

Today, I was privileged enough to attend not one but two great panel discussions on a topic close to my heart, Fair Trade. While being familiar with some of the local and regional Fair Trade associations and retailers, I was blown away by the breadth of experiences and the passion that the various panelists brought to the discussions.

The first panel addressed one of the major challenges in the mainstreaming of Fair Trade - how do we influence the large untapped proportion of consumers to affect long lasting change in preferences? The other important question was how do we compete in the market with other non-Fair Trade products?

The next panel was focused on attracting investment in Fair Trade - tracing the supply chain of Fair Trade and discussing some of the key attributes of Fair Trade that deter traditional financiers and limit micro-financiers such as lack of collateral and the scale of Fair Trade.

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